The translator’s gaze: Intersemiotic translation as transactional process

This first chapter sets the stage and provides a theoretical and analytical framework for the rest of the volume in the context of semiotics, cognitive poetics, psychoanalysis and transformative learning theory. Challenging boundaries between source and target and recognizing the topographical limitations that tend to be placed on conceptions of modalities and media, we offer a perspective of intersemiotic translation as a subjective, synaesthetic and relational experience to be rendered, rather than a message or content-and-form package to be carried across modal or medial boundaries. Hence, we posit that what makes intersemiotic translation translation is not so much the end result but the praxis of translation, illustrating our argument with examples from our own practice: Translation Games, Wozu Image? and Jetties.